On a clear day you can see what's in front of your face

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
- T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

March has been a bit like that April. But today, an April day, has been a good one. This morning I felt my heart sink with that nameless despair and I slept in a slant of sun, my head heavy with grey dreams and the dread of waking up. When my eyes opened it was to a full sunilit sky. I went out then, walked for hours.Stared at the undulations of the water....


...locked eyes with a highly rude looking seagull, met someone I know on the street twice - once on my way up and once on my way back, at which point she'd bought a new hat she seemed quite happy with- saw that the Portugese bakery had opened for the season and ate a slice of (delectable) orange torte. Leaned against the rock wall in my favourite tiny corner of beach until the shade got too cool. Wandered around looking at windows, weather vanes, people, t-shirts, prop shop perfect clouds. The difficulty of things doesn’t cease, I know that, but some days are simple. Some days we are lucky, we can sense their simplicity. We can suspend the necessary protections of irony. When we come home, instead of unlocking the door we may just sit in the last orange slice of leaving sun and we can notice, that the plants are beginning to bud and can let whatever that means spread through our hearts like an inkstain.



So, for once, a simple poem from a poet I normally like for his dystopia.

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
-Philip Larkin, The Trees